Japanese Reading Report: 15 June 2025

On monday morning I flew to America. I was planning to do a mix of anime, reading, and gaming on the plane, but I ended up just reading for most of the time, which was probably for the best.

ラーゼフォン

After really digging into this series this week I think it might be peak. It manages to nail the interpersonal relationships between Ayato and the other characters while also giving plenty of other character relationships time to develop and matter.

There was one episode which was a flashback fleshing out the history between three older characters which worked well even as a standalone story.

Another episode I liked was one where Ayato is brought into a dream world and has to navigate out of it (sort of). The architects of the dream try to keep him there by giving him what they think he wants, which also sort of played off some anime tropes while showing the story to be fairly mature. In a later episode Ayato continued to live with the trauma of the dream experience.

花の鎖

Thanks to all the time on the plane I got a tonne of reading of this done, however it ended up just being enough to catch up with my original pace which had fallen behind severely in the last two weeks.

There have been a lot of developments in the story, but I don't really have the means to recall or do justice to everything. The latest chapter broke the pattern a little bit and had Yukino's chapter first, sort of giving finality to her story (I wonder if she'll get a little post-story thing or if that's everything done and dusted) and finishing with her naming her new child Satsuki, which lead into... Satsuki's final chapter, which I'm reading right now.

There have been a lot of themes of family, but not all of them are positive. In Yukino's story a big point of drama is that everyone in her family sided with her cousin instead of her and her husband after a drama erupted.

I also feel like the whole "who is K" mystery stopped mattering more or less. Maybe it will re-emerge as a major issue for Rika when we finish the last chapter, but I got so wrapped up in Yukino and Satsuki's stories that Rika's feels a bit distant for now.

英雄伝説　空の軌跡ＦＣ

This week I was randomly inspired to try this series (again). It's one that a friend regularly talks (talked?) about, and I had a wave of enjoyment towards the Ys series a few years ago, so it's one that I'm open to enjoying if I have enough time for it.

I probably played around 5 hours over the week. I really like Estelle as a main character. She's very outgoing and friendly, but the ways she responds to unpleasant things is what really makes her charming. I don't really care as much about Joshua. He's a bit of a generic protagonist - A quiet, mysterious boy who plays tsukkomi to Estelle's boke. I expect that as the story progresses we'll see parts of his past surface and he'll probably end up as the more "important" character, but Estelle is definitely the character I like the best (and I imagine most people probably feel that way).

One of the things I always hear about the Trails series is that the world and NPCs are extremely rich and full of interconnected stories and histories. I definitely got the sense that Estelle had a history with almost every NPC in the starting town from the way the tutorial sections played out. I've also had this idea in my mind while doing some of the earlier quests. I fetched a quartz shard for a little kid in the starting town and the whole time I was thinking "I'm onto you, kid. I'll remember you in three games when you're old enough to be a booksmart party member."